the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Albany. Its necessity was unanimously conceded by all those who expressed any opinion, and the only point of difference was as to the extent and scope of its initial movement.

Its foundation upon a scale commensurate with its importance and the development of our mineral wealth, and with a range and grade of pursuits in the departments of Geology, Natural History and Physics, similar (mutatis mutandis) to the European schools of mines generally, was admitted to be the best and must ultimately be the only true foundation.

But it should be remembered that such institutions do not spring up full armed-full fledged like classic mentors from cerebral embryonics of modern Jupiters. These invaluable European schools had moderate beginnings, an ovicular germ, and by progressive developments have attained their present structural organization. Science in the exercise of its legitimate functions, put forth its great laws of adaptation and adjustment, and fitted these schools to the growth and mineral developments of the respective countries. They grew with society and its requirements, and will continue so to do only with accelerated velocity from already acquired momentum. And so, I apprehend, it must and will be with our American School of Mines. Its foundation-its initial movement must be practical and adaptive. If its first movement is only to establish a Repository for the collection of our American Economic Mineralogy: plans of mines; models of mines and mineral basins and deposits; geological sections of valleys; orographic models in wood or plastic materials; the names, uses, descriptions, of tools and implements used in mining; drawings showing the laws of shafting, drifting, ventilating, upcast and downcast workings, &c., and many other associated requisites; if such a repository is obtained, something will have been done towards the great object in view. Such a beginning, humble although it may be, is believed to be the true one, especially when connected with a library of mining works and authors located at the Repository.

In the Repository should be found the crude or natural clays of which our bricks are or may be made. Our carbonates and sulphates of lime and various limestones in the rough and polished state (many readers will remember the variety in the Washington Monument)-all showing marbles unsurpassed in any other country-should have their prominent positions.

It is believed that our clays, kaolins, marbles, slates, &c., afford materials for encaustic tiles, tesseræ, guilloche work, mosaics, tessellated pavements, pottery, porcelains, water bottoms, floors, &c., equal to any other formations of the other continents, and will compare favorably with any ancient Berytus.

Our sandstones, embracing scores of varieties, and equal to any in the world, have their place in connection with their practical uses in the arts and requirements of our American life. The

kinds-component parts-comparative utility and durability of our granites-could be ascertained at a glance.

The sands and materials used in the manufacture of glass would have their appropriate collocation, and the visitor would be apprised of the interesting fact, that the best glass in Europe is made in part from materials exported from the United States.

In its appropriate place we should find the Fossilogy of our State (and in turn of our country) the best defined of any geological system thus far known. The order and elements of our geological eras illustrated by appropriate models, would do more to impress the observer or student of geology with a true idea of the subject than months of study from books only.

The Metallurgical department, with its specimens of crude minerals, and exhibiting the order and process of manufacture, each condition of its reduction and change from raw material to the manufactured article, would probably be the interesting one to the early realizing eye of American mineral owners.

In connection with this Repository and Library, arrangements should be made for lectures on the practice (I do not as yet call it the science) of mining.

uch an organization might be made in connection with some existing institution, having a corp of professors devoted to a course similar to the scientific course of the University or the Free Academy. The professor of the art of mining should at first draw his remuneration from the attendants upon his lectures. It is true such a professorship would be no sinecure, and its duties would only be discharged by a devotee of abstract or applied science.

Perhaps it may be said by some readers that the endowment of such a professorship would be no difficult matter in a community where so many mining interests are concentrated, and we coincide in the opinion; but would it not be better to take the amount of such an endowment (say $25,000), and expend it in the establishment of the Repository and Library before alluded to, and the importation from the best of European mines and schools of the most improved and best developed models of mines, and in the manufactures at home of wooden or composition models of our whole American geology and geodesy. It is believed that some such arrangement might, and should be, made with some of our city (instead of country) institutions, for the reason that a large portion of the mineral and mining interests of the country are represented in our city. To say nothing of the centralizing power of capital and wealth, science and arts in our city, we have good examples in the European world for the establishment of such an institution in the city instead of the country.

The present condition of science in France is materially due to the "Institute of France," and from it have sprung as collaborators the numerous town and communal societies and organizations for the diffusion of scientific knowledge. So has it been in England, where London is the focal point for the applied sciences

and their profitable sequences, while all over the realm the abstract sciences have found their local habitations even without sequential profits.

The geological surveys of the several States have developed an immense treasure of mineral wealth. Twenty-four or five States have to a greater or less extent engaged in, or are now prosecuting such explorations, and a corp of over seventy of our ablest Geologists and savans has been, or is now engaged in this work of discovery. But cui bono? for whom and to whom does all this labor enure? whose is the practical benefit of these mineral values -these geological developments? It may be safely answered that thus far the dealers in mining stocks and shares have been the principal gainers. Scores of valuable mining properties are now tied up in the complications of incorporated stock operations and dissolutions, which properties, if mined properly, would give large additions to our native mineral wealth. In most of these cases more has been expected from profitable returns of sales of stock, than from sales of ores or metals. It is said, and no doubt with truth, that more capital is annually wasted or lost by unprofitable or ignorant systems of mining, than would recapitalize the whole iron interests of the United States.

It is almost a daily question in Wall Street, where can one go to procure some reliable information about the cost, mode, and profits of mining? Where can one go and read and study and apply his own common sense, enlightened by the practical and experimental knowledge of others, to his own particular case or property? Where can abstract scientific knowledge find its application? Where can wisdom and knowledge be derived from the practice and labors of others?

Such a Repository and Library and Professorship as has been already suggested, would be one step towards the acquisition of such practical knowledge. This step would lead to others-the nucleus would grow by gradual accretions-the molecule would become the beautiful crystal, and in time we should have OUR schools of mines, with thousands of students-OUR professorships of metallurgy, geology, mineralogy, organic and analytic chemistry, and cognate branches; we should have our halls of mines and models of the internal structure of hills and deposits; orographic and stratigraphic sections, all turning mother earth inside out for our supervision, and telling us in a word the whole story of an investment in its inception, progress and results. Upheavals and subsidences, erosions and denudations, dikes, faults, and elvans, all will be made apparent and appreciable to the common sense f observant minds, and we shall no longer hear (as has been actuolly witnessed within a few weeks) of a large and wealthy company determining their shafts, drainage, and breastworks by the strike, and their adits and levels by the dip of their mineral vein.

Let it be remembered that mining exploration has produced some of the highest efforts of human skill in mechanical philosophy

and involved a system of subterranean architecture which has few if any parallelisms upon the surface of our earth. Take for example the works in the Rörerbühel mines. These mines were worked to the depth (according to Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. I., page 159) of 3,107 feet, and this great depth of excavation was attained in the sixteenth century, and before the reputed modern? invention of gunpowder, and plans of these works are yet preserved. The old Kuttenberger mines of Bohemia are 3,778 feet deep, the greatest known depth of any mine. There are mines in Cornwall, England, of the depth of 1,300, 1,600, and 1,650 feet. The engine shaft of the Consolidated Mines is 1,650 feet deep, and the total length of adits, shafts, galleries, sixty-three miles. The adit for the discharge of water from the Gwenap mines is thirty miles in length. The silver mine of Valenciana in Mexico is 1,860 feet in depth. Unaccustomed as we in this country are to realize such wondrous underground works, it may seem still more surprising that models in wood, leather, plaster, sulphur (and of late indiarubber and gutta-percha), or drawings are to be found showing to the eye a pictorial and graphic representation of the whole underground operation.

The theory of veins also involves points of the highest interest, and models and graphical delineations of them would save many dollars to the farmers' pockets.

Their productiveness is measurably influenced by their associated rocks, and when an unscientific man is told that in hard or crystalline rocks his vein will be pinched up and thin; that in spongy or porous rocks it is less well defined and is diffused; that veins generally are more productive in some hard and decomposed granites; that veins in the granites deteriorate as they pass into the slates and conglomerates; when he is told and showed further that there are veins of injection and crystallization; veins of sublimation and condensation, and probably veins of electrochemical precipitation from aqueous solution, and is shown in the laboratory and lecture-room how such things are to be apprehended, it is reasonable to suppose that in our country, as elsewhere, practical knowledge and pecuniary profit will go pari

passu.

It is not Americanizing too much to say that the mineral wealth of the United States exceeds that of any other country. The native mineral wealth of Virginia alone exceeds the half of Europe, and yet for want of proper mining we are dependent on foreign lands for the most of our valuable metals. In some instances ores of argentiferous galenas are taken to Europe, the silver extracted and the marketable lead returned to us at full market price. The art of mining in addition to its legitimate fruits and benefits, has done much to develope other arts, particularly typography and engraving. Some of the most beautiful specimens of the biblio. graphic art have been devoted to mines and kindred subjects. These brief and palpable suggestions on this interesting subject

are submitted to your readers, with the announcement that a number of gentlemen of similar views are preparing a modus operandi for such a beginning of the American School of Mines.

ROBERT G. RANKIN.

ART IV.-VISIT TO THE LAKE SUPERIOR REGION, IN 1854.*-By Prof. L. E. RIVOT, of the French School of Mines. No. 5.

[Continued from page 418, Vol. VI.]

THE trap certainly extends a great distance westward into the State of Wisconsin, and the excursions which have been made there by hardy explorers have determined the existence of deposits of native copper, well beyond the limits of Michigan. It will not be until quite a future day when the miner will advance westward, for the facilities of sustenance and transportation will be more unfavorable than at Keweenaw Point, or in the Portage and Ontonagon regions.

The conglomerates present themselves in very powerful beds on two sides of the trap, but their thickness will not compare with the great zone observed near Agate Harbor and Copper Harbor. It should not be concluded, however, that there actually is less of the conglomerate in the Ontonagon region than at Keweenaw Point; the alluvium covers too vast an extent to allow it to be possible to determine any thing in this respect.

The conglomerates have not as yet been noted between Portage Lake and the Algonquin mine; between this mine and the Douglass Houghton the beds are very powerful from east to west; there the trap runs N. 25° E. and S. 25° W., and the axis of elevation is nearly in the middle of the zone of trap.

More to the west the direction of the trap is almost parallel to the coast; the chain of mountains, from a double slope, is nearer the southern limit of the trap; the conglomerates appear in beds which are more powerful at the north than the south.

I shall show further on that the deposition of the sedimentary beds can be explained by the obliquity of the fracture produced by the upheaval in the series of trap, conglomerate and sandstone.

The sandstone presents in the Ontonagon region a vast development, and forms on two sides of the trap two belts, the larger of which exceeds at many points 25 and even 30 kilometres. The one on the north extends to the borders of the lake, the other on the south is bounded by the metamorphic rocks and by the granite and trap.

The sandstone on the north is mostly covered by alluvium, and its deposit is not apparent, except at a certain number of points. It is generally colored red by the oxide of iron, but many beds are almost white, and their alternation produces on a small scale the curious effect of the pictured rocks. At the point of contact with the trap and conglomerate, the sandstone extends towards the north-west under a very variable angle, but always nearly equal to the angle of inclination of the trap-belts. Near the